He agrees: “it was all crazy”. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson considered a “special forces operation” against a warehouse in the Netherlands to seize anti-Covid vaccines during the pandemic, he revealed in his memoirs.
Boris Johnson commissioned in March 2021 “work to determine whether it would be technically possible to launch an amphibious raid on a warehouse in Leiden, the Netherlands, and take what was legally (in the United Kingdom)” and which the country “desperately needed”, we can read in extracts published Friday in the Daily Mail from “Unleashed” (“unleashed” in French), his memoirs to be published in October.
A risk of being discovered
At the time, the United Kingdom was engaged in a standoff with the European Union (EU) over the supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine, partly manufactured in the Netherlands. Believing that the doses had been “kidnapped” by the EU, the British Prime Minister imagined this operation which he discussed with senior military officials.
According to Boris Johnson, Deputy Chief of the Defense Staff Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers said the plan was “certainly feasible” and would involve the use of rigid inflatable boats to navigate the Dutch canals. The mission, however, carried a serious risk of detection, which would have forced London to “explain why we are effectively invading a long-time NATO ally”.
“I secretly agreed with what they were all thinking, but I didn’t want to say it out loud: it was all crazy,” Boris Johnson concludes in his memoirs.
